Randy Fowler recently won the Prime Minister’s Volunteer Award for lifelong achievement for his work education young people on the dangers of impaired driving. Twenty years ago, Fowler was driving drunk when he crashed his vehicle, killing his best friend and leaving him with a brain injury.

“He’s a real big wig, you know?” Randy Fowler says while flashing an impish grin as he points to a photograph on his dining-room table. In it, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has an arm around the 52-year-old Calgarian, who once again wears a mischievous smile.

Spend any time around Fowler, and you’ll soon be accustomed to his subtle, but always present, sense of humour. “If you can’t laugh at life,” says the man who suffered a traumatic brain injury at age 22, “then you’re not going to survive it.”

The jokes that fly fast and furious during my afternoon visit on Monday are in stark contrast to the reason I have made this belated but highly anticipated acquaintance with Fowler. Like many others, I’m well versed in his story, a tragic example of the perils of impaired driving.

An entire generation of Calgarians, in fact, has grown up knowing Fowler’s cautionary tale. For the past two decades, he has been visiting hospitals and schools across Western Canada, sharing the story of how his life was inextricably altered when he chose to drive drunk.

Fowler, who in 2006 was given a Heroes Foundation award for his years of service to the community, is back home from a December trip to Ottawa, where he received the Prime Minister’s Volunteer Award for Lifelong Achievement. “It was pretty neat,” he says of this latest honour. “It’s nice to be noticed for all the hard work.”

Back in the fall of 1982, Fowler couldn’t have imagined he’d devote his life’s work to speaking out against impaired driving. “I was the life-of-the-party kind of guy,” he says of those youthful days. “All I cared about was having fun and playing football.”

A player with the Calgary Colts, he had recently been invited to attend a Saskatchewan Roughriders camp. To celebrate, he and his buddies headed to Montana for a weekend of partying. On the way home, he says, “we kept drinking, speeding down the highway in a jacked-up 4X4, no seatbelts on.”

Fowler, who was driving, lost control of the truck and “flipped end over end” across a farm field. His best friend, Don, was ejected from the vehicle and died en route to hospital; Fowler suffered severe arm injuries along with his head trauma.

When he later came out of a three-month coma, doctors told his mother, Janice, that he’d likely spend the rest of his life incapacitated.

Not long after that, the parents of his dead friend came to visit him at the hospital. The expected anger, however, wasn’t there. “They walked into my room smiling,” he says. “They were so happy I made it out of the coma.” He learned then that one of the most important things in life was the ability to forgive.

It would take several years of intense physical therapy for Fowler to regain some of the motor skills he had lost; today, his left side is still atrophied, while he speaks slowly and with some effort.

The hardest challenge, he says, was forgiving himself. The experience with Don’s parents inspired him to make “something good out of this horrible thing,” to spread his message to young people on the dangers of impaired driving.

“I get as much out of the kids as they get out of hearing my story,” he says of his talks through programs such as PARTY (Prevent Alcohol and Risk Related Trauma in Youth). “When I start to tell my story, the whole atmosphere in the room changes. I know it’s making a difference in the way they look at things.”

What’s made a big difference in his life has been his work with PARTY as well as the Association for the Rehabilitation of the Brain Injured, where he sits on the board of directors and has raised tens of thousands of dollars through various fundraisers.

The biggest factor in his surviving and thriving, though, has been his mother, with whom he shares a condo in the city’s southeast. “Friends faded away after the accident, but my mom has never left my side,” he says. “Without her, there was no way I could have come back.”

Eventually, Fowler did learn to forgive himself for his tragic mistake. “You can’t carry on otherwise,” he says. “I do this work now, because I know if I had died and Don lived, he was the kind of guy who would have busted his butt trying to make up for it.”

Then, just as I get up to leave, Fowler insists on a big bear hug and a reminder: “You can’t change the past. You have to learn from it and move on.

“And remember to laugh at life — because that can get you through the worst.”

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